Why orienteering? Svenska tjej at oringen
Ingvild Bjørhei: run in D18long during oringen and reached the finish 2 times (day 2 and 3). Here on the picture she was spectator during the worldcup sprint distance.
Orienteering-news website
The Flemish club KOL once again won the Interclub championship this year in the forests around Sankt Vith, in the German speaking part of Belgium. Unlike its name suggests, this competition is not a relay, but a regular national event. Runners score points for their club according to how many clubs participate in their particular category. If there are runners of 10 clubs, the winner scores 10 points, the second one, even if he's member of the same club as the winner, 9 and then down to the tenth runner , who scores 1 point.
KOL scored a total of 111 points, 18 points in front of runner-up hamok. Last year's winner Omega disappointed with only 54 point, still enough to secure a third spot. All clubs lacked a lot of their regular runners due to foreign competitions and holidays. Some, however, did quite an effort to run for their club, most notably Greet Oeyen, already active in the five day events in Italy and France, yet still running today.
You can see that KOL scores 18 points in the H21 category. It is strange and maybe a bit unfair that H21 runners score points for the Interclub. There is no belgian title in the H21 category, only HE is important there. Dropping H21 would not have changed the standings though, but it seems like a contradiction, especially when HB does not count towards the club total.
All Belgian WOC runners were absent, but there were still a lot of good runners in the HE and DE classes. They had to run quite a distance, the HE race totaled 15,4km, with 470m climbing. The DE course was slightly more human with 8,9 km and 240m climbing.
For the HE course, the expected winning time of 1:30 was far away, even for winner Nicolas Sillien (CO Pégase), with a time of 1:42:48. The second place was for youngster Thomas van der Kleij (hamok), 2:45 behind, almost two minutes faster than third place Geert Simkens (KOL).
In the DE course, the first two places were for CO Liège runners Severine Vandermeulen and Aline Hermans, with Vinciane Mulpas of ASUB in the third place.
The swedish Jenny Lönnkvist won the womens race. There was no way to keep up with her speed. She did a perfect race and in the end she was 94 seconds in front of the Norwegian Ida Marie Næss Bjørgul. Bjørgul had one more minute down to the third spot. Tatyana Mendel and Saila Kinni had to share the bronze medal after a very close race.
Jenny Lönnkvist and Petter Eriksson
The Belgian Johan Goubau did a good race, and finished in spot 8th in the B-final. Gilles Deneyer became 38th .
Men, A-final
1 | Lundanes, Olav | NOR | 23:25 | (+00:00) |
2 | Eriksson, Petter | SWE | 23:59 | (+00:44) |
3 | Hubmann, Martin | SUI | 24:02 | (+00:47) |
4 | Dæhli, Magne | NOR | 24:29 | (+01:14) |
5 | Chromy, Adam | CZE | 24:30 | (+01:15) |
6 | Krajcik, Michal | SLO | 24:52 | (+01:37) |
1 | Lönnkvist, Jenny | SWE | 22:07 | (+00:00) |
2 | Bjørgul, Ida Marie | NOR | 23:41 | (+01:25) |
3 | Mendel, Tatyana | RUS | 24:32 | (+02:25) |
3 | Saila, Kinni | FIN | 24:32 | (+02:25) |
5 | Trubkina, Anastasia | RUS | 24:41 | (+02:34) |
6 | Karochova, Simona | CZE | 24:44 | (+02:37) |
start day 1 - photo: asub
Yves Briers and Nele Hamels, will marry soon. Congratulations!
Afterwards there was, like always, a bbq… The weather wasn’t everything but I think everybody enjoyed his/her meal. The lights didn’t work that well, but I thought it had a cosy effect!
I think the hamok-youth can’t complain about their relay, 73 teams appeared at the start and the BBQ was sold out!
Well done hamok!
The Flemish junior team did some test races this weekend. On saturday, there was a middle distance at De Maasvallei and today, a long distance was run at Helchterenbos, where a score-O was held for normal runners.
At the middle distance event, only four boys and five girls were present. Official results are not yet available, but as far as we know, Jeremy Genar and Elisabeth Henkes won the races. The course started off with some controls on an old (awfully steep) mining hill and continued to the tricky "green" area of the map, where according to Jeremy "Quarters of hours were lost by some". Interested readers can find the map over at Jeremy's and Adriaan's blog.
Today's race was a long distance of 11,9 or 8 km in varied but rough terrain. The expected winning time for the boys was 70 minutes and 60 minutes for the girls. The races were won by Yannick Michiels and Miek Fabré. Yesterday's winner in the girls category, Elisabeth Henkes, did not participate. The results in the boy's category were quite interesting, because the first three runners were within one minute. We expect the map to be uploaded to Jeremy's blog shortly.
These test races were held because the Flemish juniors do not run JWOC this year, instead focusing on next year's JWOC in Sweden. The French speaking Belgians are sending two runners, the experienced Johan Goubau (his 4th JWOC) and newcomer Gilles Deneyer, but they are only leaving two days before the start of the event, so results could be not as good as possible by jetlag.
One of the problems with the Belgian JWOC teams the last years, besides hardly any training in relevant terrain, was the lack of much training or orienteering in june because of exams at school/university. At least 6 weeks are pretty much lost for quality training, which was not different this year as far as I know. You can do some running without compromising your marks too much, but doing some more intense trainings is very much impossible, let alone participating in orienteering events, which I think is really important if you want a good result. These problems are way harder at university than during secondary education, but next year's JWOC is doable for all, because most boys (Jeremy, Wouter, Yannich and Adriaan) will not yet be at university and with some support of the federation, the girls (Elien, Miek, Saartje) and Jochen will be able to change the date of their exams. Jochen, by the way, is injured since march and he will only know what's wrong in september, which is not good at all.
The group of juniors seems quite small, and a bit more competition would be good, but things were no different the last years. Those who did run these races are really motivated, and they can already run good results in senior classes. The trainer Stefan Thiels is also doing good work, so there is still some hope for good results in Swedern.
The regional event was a Score-O. There are hardly any Score-O's in Belgium, so it's always a fun challenge. There were three courses, one of 60', one of 50' and finally one of 40'. Course setter Yves Briers had some 40 controls spread all over the map, which is pretty nice, with rough open land, lots of sand and small contours. Results are available, along with the map with route choices of the A-race winner. No-one managed to find all 40 controls within the timeframe of one hour.